Abstract
The Secret Life of Plants, a 1973 book that was developed into a 1979 documentary film, reports on a flurry of parapsychological research involving attempts to communicate with plants using electrodes, lie detectors, and psychic powers. The book highlights the work of Cleve Backster, an American researcher who claimed he could demonstrate that plants could read people’s minds and that measurements of his plants’ emotional responses to the randomized death of brine shrimp revealed empathetic connections “even on the lower levels of life.” Although this research appears risible in retrospect, Backster’s work expresses attempts to conceptualize plant subjectivity and plant agency against the backdrop of the emergent environmental movement. While it might be overly charitable to credit these experiments in plant communication with inspiring contemporary research into the ways plants share information with one another and with other species, Backster’s outlandish investigations suggest enduring object lessons for human beings in general and for the environmental humanities field in particular regarding the ways that plants continue to baffle us, to enchant us, and even, in their own weird way, to speak to us.
Tolkien’s Ents, Swamp Thing, Audrey II, Groot. The lore of sentient, expressive plants is colorful and vast, and one of the most extraordinary representatives of this class of voluble vegetables is certainly a particular dracaena plant that had the good or bad fortune to grace the office of Cleve Backster, a former interrogation specialist for the CIA, in 1968. After retiring from the CIA, Backster developed a reputation as a leading expert on the polygraph, running a school specializing in training law enforcement personnel to administer lie detector tests. As Backster tells the story, one night in his office, on an impulse, he attached the electrodes of a polygraph instrument to the leaves of the dracaena plant to see if watering the plant affected the readings on the polygraph’s galvanometer. Backster’s hypothesis was that the watered plant would show lower electrical resistance, but instead the tracing pattern on the graph paper displayed a response that looked familiar to the trained interrogator: it was a classic response to an emotional stimulus. The dracaena plant, Backster intuited, seemed to enjoy being watered, expressing its joy through a kind of electrical signature identical to that emitted by human beings. This was not a simple chemical effect of the water altering the chemical composition of the cells; this was something above the physiochemical: a psychological effect. Backster had used the polygraph machine to simultaneously reveal that the plant had a mind and to read the plant’s mind.
This remarkable turn of events, however, was only a prelude to the more earth-shattering discovery yet to come. Backster reasoned that if a pleasurable drink of water could make the plant tingle with happiness, maybe torturing the plant might cause it to reveal other secrets of its inner world. Backster tried dunking one of the plant’s leaves in hot coffee, but to no effect. He needed to do something really bad to the plant. He needed to burn it. As these plans unfolded in Backster’s mind, the plant, still connected to the polygraph machine, immediately exhibited tracings indicative of distress. It turns out that, while Backster was trying to unlock the secrets of reading the plant’s mind, the plant had been monitoring his thoughts all along, and supposedly had been since his secretary originally brought it into his office, and all of the plants of the world are likely doing the same thing to all of us all the time. Backster came to describe this underlying level of psychic attunement as “Primary Perception,” a form of sentience shared by all living things and possibly even by inanimate objects.1
The capacity of plants to respond to people’s thoughts has become known as the Backster effect, and, throughout the 1970s, it was the subject of innumerable magazine articles, radio programs, and television segments. Backster’s research is presented as the basis for a new understanding of cosmic reality in Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird’s bestselling 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants as well as the book’s 1978 film adaptation. In addition to describing Backster’s research, both versions of The Secret Life of Plants also describe studies undertaken by researchers inspired by the implications of the Backster effect. One of Backster’s students shows a Clockwork Orange–style film montage to a human subject, while a nearby plant appears to mimic the subject’s emotional responses. Soviet scientists detect a cabbage plant’s distress when another cabbage is cut up in its presence. A husband and wife, the Hashimotos, developed an instrument capable of rendering a cactus’s emotional responses as synthesized noises, and they endeavor to teach it the Japanese alphabet (a project that became the basis for a 2017 documentary, Conversation with a Cactus).2 To this day, Backster’s ideas continue to be revisited in shows such as Adam Ruins Everything and MythBusters.3
The enduring notoriety achieved by Backster’s hypothesis suggests the degree to which his attunement to the point of view of plants has resonated with the popular imagination. In a culture that has frequently been accused of widespread “plant blindness,”4 Backster’s celebrity is all the more remarkable, representing a salient “contact zone”5 where people and plants encounter one another in transformative ways. In this respect, the strangeness of the Backster effect, along with the absurdity of Backster’s research methodology, reflects the uncanny character of any effort to conceptualize the radical alterity of a nonhuman world that resists conventional conceptual frameworks. In its engagement with the vegetal bizarre, Backster’s research resembles the literary genre of New Weird fiction, but the fact that Backster’s surreal experiments in plant communication and telepathy take place in a real world of laboratories and polygraph machines enhances its uncanny character, as does the different ways that Backster’s outlandish ideas have strangely grown, over the last five decades, into accepted intellectual positions in the fields of both botany and cultural studies. Taking Backster’s work seriously in the full complexity of its farcical, problematic, and visionary aspects provides insight into the challenging work of the environmental humanities themselves, which also represent attempts to facilitate contact zones between the human world (the humanities) and the nonhuman world (the environment), attempts that are inevitably rife with some of the same tensions and contradictions that characterize Backster’s work: the tightrope walk of empathizing with the nonhuman while also respecting its otherness, of theorizing it without schematizing it, of communicating with it rather than ventriloquizing on its behalf.
It is easy, and also kind of fun, to identify problematic aspects of Backster’s inquiry into plant-human communication. From a scientific point of view, the most scathing rebuke of Backster’s research came from two Yale biologists in an article cheekily titled “The Not-So-Secret Life of Plants.” Arthur W. Galston and Clifford L. Slayman describe the challenges involved in interpreting electrophysiological data, which is prone to semirandom “noise” that is often misrecognized as evidence. More fundamentally, they condemn the “totally unscientific discontinuity of logic”6 of Backster’s intuition that the fact that the tracing pattern appeared on the graph at the same time that he envisioned burning the plant indicated an emotional response from the plant rather than one of a thousand other more likely possibilities. Scientific attempts to reproduce Backster’s results have repeatedly failed to do so. Most definitively, a 1975 study concluded that, while Backster’s hypothesis “will remain an intriguing speculation, one should note that only the limited published data of Backster support it.”7 Backster evolved a range of explanations for why it proved so hard for other researchers to reproduce his results or why he himself failed to reproduce his own results in front of witnesses. He insisted that plants sometimes “fainted” when they were under too much stress and that they would not respond to botanical researchers whose work may involve harming plants as part of their work. More fundamentally, he explained that a strong bond between plant and human had to be present in order for the Backster effect to occur, and that the difficulty of reproducing his results was actually evidence that the scientific method itself was insufficient to inquire into the bold new dimensions of Primary Perception.8
Beyond the obvious experimental flaws, however, sit other kinds of flaws in Backster’s vision. Most conspicuously, Backster’s impression that the dracaena plant was displaying an emotional response to his passing thought appears blatantly anthropocentric, as if the discovery that plants could think were coextensive with the discovery that what plants think about is human beings. While the idea of Primary Perception suggests that plants are more in tune with the psychic environment than human beings are, Backster’s experimental practice affirms his lordship and dominion over the dracaena, conceiving of the plant as a combination of a pet and an experimental subject, confident in the belief that, like a loyal puppy, it is always thinking of him. In a follow-up experiment, Backster’s attempt to assess whether the dracaena responds to the death of a cupful of brine shrimp, Backster himself has to automate the process and go for a long walk away from his laboratory.9 Only by removing himself from the site can he ensure that the plant won’t be obsessively focused on him and will be able to concentrate on the experiment.
The brine shrimp experiment, meanwhile, ups the ante of Backster’s oblivious anthropomorphism. Inspired by his impression that plants evince an empathetic connection with other life-forms, Backster arranges an experiment that involves the boiling-alive of numerous brine shrimp. Backster’s hypothesis that the plant will evince an emotional response to the death of the brine shrimp reflects his belief that “even on the lower level of life, there’s a profound consciousness or awareness that binds all things together.”10 Backster, however, positions himself outside—or, more correctly, above—this cosmic consciousness. His willingness to murder the brine shrimp in the interest of demonstrating the profound empathy connecting all things presents a jarring paradox and, more fundamentally, a profound lack of awareness of the paradox. At the same time, his casual description of both the plant and the shrimp as “lower forms of life” betrays his reliance on an Aristotelian chain of being. Human beings’ blindness to Primary Perception does not disrupt this ontological hierarchy, especially now that Backster himself has deciphered the secret that the plants have been keeping to themselves all of these millennia. Backster is the hero of the story, and it’s easy to see that he projects his own human expectations onto his experimental subjects. Galston and Slayman compare Backster’s interpretation of his plant’s polygraph readings as an emotional response to someone seeing a face-like shape in the moon and concluding that the moon has a face. Even if the dracaena does display an emotional response to the death of brine shrimp, it could just as easily be a sadistic thrill as a cry of pity. But Backster expresses supreme confidence in his authority to decipher the plant’s secret language.
Backster’s relationship with the living things in his laboratory parallels the dynamic he mastered over many years as a Cold War–era CIA interrogator, particularly the radically one-sided power imbalance of such encounters. Upon initially recognizing the “pleasure” response evoked by the watering, Backster immediately, with an interrogator’s brutal logic, imagined pressure points in the plant’s physiology that would cause it maximum pain. Killing the brine shrimp in the plant’s presence recalls a torturer’s ploy of brutalizing one captive to get another captive’s confession. Backster’s experimental methodology constitutes an extension of postcolonial Cold War political practice into scientific conquest of plants’ secret language. Casting the dracaena into the role of the Soviet spy, domestic revolutionary, captured Vietcong, or hapless subaltern, however, predetermines the nature of the “conversation.” The only things the experimental subject can say are those utterances that are approved by the interrogator, in partnership with his truth-machine. Backster eavesdrops on his plant’s thoughts, and his plants eavesdrop on his thoughts, but there is no interaction or reciprocity, only Backster self-importantly annotating his graph paper. It is not surprising that the only meanings Backster finds in the plant’s utterances are meanings that are easily familiar to a human—pleasure, pain, fear, and pity—rather than anything alien or uncanny. It is a dynamic that is not only insulting to plants, conceptualizing them as little green men, but also to the nature of communication itself, representing this interspecies conversation as one devoid of content or consequence. The mythos of the “lie detector” itself as a piece of technology straddles the border between science and pseudoscience, exerting a perennial appeal in its prospect of providing a technological solution to the pervasive epistemological ambiguity of human reality. The prospect of using this technology to decode the secret life of plants replaces the age-old mystery and poetry of plants with a technoscientific field of specialized jargon. Solvejg Nitzke addresses this effect when she asks, “Is the desire to know each and every thing about the secret life of nonhuman others more than just another instance of human dominance?”11 In Backster’s case, the answer is, arguably, no.
For all of the clumsiness, credulity, and general absurdity of Backster’s findings, however, it is impossible to avoid acknowledging that research in plant communication has indeed vindicated the idea that plants are constantly emitting and responding to messages that are imperceptible to human beings. Since the publication of The Secret Life of Plants, an entire subdiscipline of botany, plant communication, has examined the role that volatile organic compounds, electrical signaling, and mycorrhizal networks play in allowing plants to communicate with one another about soil conditions, threats from herbivores, and other news about the plant world.12 A vocal faction of scientists in plant communication even espouses the label “plant neurobiology” for their field of study, describing how plants make decisions, express pain, learn, remember, and display intelligent behavior.13 This research differs markedly from Backster’s in that it focuses on how plants communicate with one another about things that are important to them, whereas Backster imagined that plants are constantly expressing generalized responses to what was going on with the humans and animals in their vicinity, like loquacious theatergoers sustaining a running commentary on the show. Plant neurologists themselves argue that Backster’s work did more to stifle scientific inquiry into plant communication than it did to stimulate it, explaining that
publicity from pop culture in the 1970s, generated by the controversial book The Secret Life of Plants (including paranormal claims that plants are attuned to human emotional states), stigmatized any possible similarities between plant signaling and animal neurobiology. Many plant biologists, wittingly or unwittingly, practiced a form of self-censorship in thought, discussion and research that inhibited asking relevant questions of possible homologies between neurobiology and phytobiology.14
Ultimately, it may be impossible to determine the scientific influence of Backster’s contribution to the cultural discourse about the sentience of plants. While it may be true that some botanists took pains to differentiate their legitimate research from the quack claims of New Age eccentrics, it is also clear that the popularity of Backster’s work made it commonplace to at least entertain the possibility that plants were responsive, expressive, agentic beings in their own right, laying a conceptual groundwork for more rigorous and scientific advancements into their “secret life.”
Indeed, the popularity of Backster’s experiments is likely due to the manner in which they stood as a representation for major cultural changes throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s in the way Americans conceptualized the relationship between humans and the natural world, between science and spirituality, and even between reality and imagination. The emergence of the environmental movement, epitomized by the creation of the EPA and the first Earth Day (both in the 1970s), along with other environmental legislation, upended the traditional middle-class American habit of perceiving the natural world as a passive standing reserve. Released from this paradigm, the natural world revealed itself as a complex and dynamic network of interactions. The emerging science of ecology not only provided a new scientific understanding of the complexity of interspecies interactions but also expressed a sense that nature was actively doing things, negotiating arrangements, pushing and getting pushed back on, alive with political tensions and compromises.15 Backster’s willingness to listen to the voice of his houseplants parallels the efforts of ecologists and environmental activists to give voice to nature. At the same time, Backster’s mystical impression that his plants were tuned in to an ineffable “cellular consciousness”16 that “binds all things together” fits into the conceptual architecture of the emerging ecological paradigm, according to which “everything is connected,” even if those connections are arcane, imperceptible, and take place beyond the timescale of human temporality. Indeed, Backster’s experiments are just one example of a boom in the field of parapsychology, which sought to use scientific forms of investigation to examine invisible networks of connection operating in psychic space. The Secret Life of Plants contextualizes Backster’s work alongside other “New Age” belief systems such as Reichian psychology, L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology, crystology, ESP, dowsing, and the laying-on of hands. Backster’s work with plants—and the air of scientific authority it aspired to—reflects a cultural moment when pseudoscientific research enjoyed a freedom of speculation and credulity that would quickly disappear in the emerging neoliberal calculus of the 1980s.
As risible as many of these New Age belief systems may appear in retrospect, it is undeniable that they stand alongside ecology and environmentalism as challenges to the objectivist-appropriatory practices of the prevailing corporate-political hegemony. Even people who may not have swallowed all of Backster’s claims could at least see in them a metaphor for the wider project of considering the world from a nonhuman perspective and using this perspective as a starting point for a radical reinterpretation of sociocultural reality. Closely related to this new perspective is the emergence of poststructuralism and deconstruction as philosophies committed to defamiliarizing conventional attitudes, attending to marginalized voices, and tracing dynamic yet cryptic connections. Backster’s discovery of “the Backster effect” led to an unraveling of his assumptions about the natural world and the scientific method, as well as of his entire worldview, an experience that the writers of The Secret Life of Plants compare to a descent into “Wonderland.”17 The details of the research itself become dwarfed by the more compelling cultural implications of the research, and if the research itself is questionable, the insight that human beings can revolutionize their understanding by attending carefully to their houseplants remains a compelling expression of the changes taking place in Western culture during this time.
In this sense, Backster’s work may be said to have more in common with critical theory than with conventional scientific inquiry. The quasi-, para-, and pseudoscientific discourse of cultural criticism habitually draws profound philosophical conclusions from fictional scenarios, recognizing the extent to which imaginative activity reveals elusive aspects of being. In particular, Backster may be categorized as a pioneering ecocritic. The movie The Secret Life of Plants came out in the same year, 1978, when the term ecocriticism was coined by William Rueckert in his essay “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” An influential ecocritical essay, Christopher Manes’s “Nature and Silence,” critiques “the sense that the status of being a speaking subject is jealously guarded as an exclusively human prerogative” and advocates perceiving the natural world as “a world of autonomous speakers.”18 Backster would be particularly at home with the more recent iteration of material ecocriticism, which emphasizes “the awareness that we inhabit a dimension crisscrossed by vibrant forces that hybridize human and nonhuman matters”19 and that nonhuman bodies “can be read as a text.”20 Backster’s interpretation of his plants’ galvanic responses as indicating pleasure, fear, and empathy leads him to conclusions that are familiar to contemporary critical theory.
The subdiscipline of plant studies is one branch of the material turn in the humanities that obviously has unique affinity with Backster’s work, and the seminal work of scholarship in this field, Michael Marder’s Plant-Thinking, contains a number of insights that Backster would certainly affirm. Broadly, Marder enjoins us to “entertain the hypothesis that vegetal life is coextensive with a distinct subjectivity with which we might engage, and which engages with us more frequently than we imagine.”21 The most conspicuous parallel between Marder and Backster involves the recognition that plants emblematize a profound aspect of being that is so elemental that it goes ordinarily unnoticed by human awareness, even though it surrounds and pervades life itself. Marder flips Aristotle’s chain of being upside down, arguing that, if plants are at the “bottom” of the chain, then they are also closest to the most elemental aspects of what it means to be alive. “After we strip life of all its recognizable features, vegetal beings go on living; plant-soul is the remains of the psyche reduced to its non-human and non-animal modality. It is life in its an-archic bareness . . . and it is a source of meaning, which is similarly bare, non-anthropocentric, and yet ontologically vibrant.”22 This primordial, elemental quality of plants corresponds closely with Backster’s thesis of Primary Perception, which similarly identified plant-being as an expression of a level of reality anterior to human consciousness. Likewise, in the same way that Backster’s attunement to plant subjectivity provoked him to rethink his assumptions about the objective, anthropocentric attitudes prevalent in the Western metaphysical tradition, Marder’s inquiry into the ontology of plants leads to the conclusion that “metaphysical umbrella categories do not cover this kind of life [plant life], lived on the hither side of the dialectics of the same and the other, identity and non-identity, individuality and anonymous existence.”23 Marder’s attentive research into the being of plants reaches similar conclusions, albeit by different means, as that reached by Backster, at least in terms of the broad outlines of their thinking. Marder is even willing to posit that plants have a language. He explains that “The language of plants belongs to the hypermaterialist tradition that . . . is alive to the spatial relations and articulations between things, animate and inanimate.”24 Marder uses his professional tool of hermeneutic phenomenology to derive his insights, while Backster uses his professional tool of the polygraph machine to derive his. Despite their different methods, however, the plants managed to communicate similar messages to both researchers.
To be sure, Backster and Marder differ markedly in their philosophical approaches to the question of plant communication—Backster’s is resolutely ontic while Marder’s is ontological—but they both direct our attention to a bigger-picture perspective where communication with plants is not only possible; it is inevitable, it is pervasive, it is happening all of the time, whether we realize it or not. On the most basic level, plants and animals are genetically interwoven, communicating through the genetic language of coevolution. Plants are more than objective presences for human beings; they are the habitat we have adapted to. Humans evolved color vision to scrutinize the ripeness of fruit and berries, a primordial example of human beings reading plants and, like Backster, being transformed in the process. At the same time, plants produce colorful berries as a way of enticing mammals to eat them and disperse their seeds, so the communication between plants and animals is deeply bidirectional, with both participants negotiating a language capable of facilitating mutual understanding. Human fingers have evolved in response to the shape of tree branches, and the universal childhood instinct of tree-climbing is evidence that the shape of trees themselves calls out in a haptic sense to human hands, articulating a welcoming message. Even the act of gripping a staff, a walking stick, or a club activates some primordial sense of power rooted in the semantic potency that connects plant bodies and human bodies. Humans have evolved in temperate climates where a view of greenery intrinsically communicates habitability, the presence of running water, the likelihood of fruit and game. It is this ancestral sympathy for green spaces (as opposed to deserts, open ocean, and tundra) that informs the symbolic logic whereby the color green stands for the environment itself in political discourse, and maybe even for the association between the color green and a sense of safety (as in a green light).
This same ability of plants to communicate intimations of tranquility likely accounts for the popularity of potted plants as office decorations. The reason Backster had a dracaena in his office in the first place is because “his secretary thought the bare office could use a touch of green.”25 Before Backster ever hooked the plant up to his polygraph, it was already participating in a number of expressive capacities. Not only does the plant itself express a kind of counterstatement to the technological sterility of Backster’s laboratory, but it also functions as a message from Backster’s secretary, an offering whose meaning may have any number of nuances. It may seem that the dracaena is merely subjected to these meanings, that the plant itself would rather be back in its native soil in an equatorial region. In The Botany of Desire, however, Michael Pollan famously examined how domestication of plant species by human beings can be understood as something that plants do to us at the same time that it is something that we do to them.26 The dracaena’s tolerance to lower light and inconsistent watering makes it an ideal houseplant, and its broad leaves suggest to North American consumers an expression of more habitable latitudes, of shade and shelter. Dracaena’s ability to evoke these human meanings has allowed it to spread all across the world, safe in the potted plants of global offices from the ravages of deforestation facing their wild cousins. It is even possible to consider a Pollan-style inversion of the power dynamic in Backster’s relationship with his own dracaena. After seducing its way into Backster’s office with its tropical glamour, the broad, flat leaves of the dracaena proved to be inviting surfaces on which to affix an electrode. The morphological similarity between the upright plant and the human form may have suggested to Backster the plant’s capacity for the recognizable emotions of pleasure and pain. The plant might even be said to have announced itself to Backster, Audrey II–style, by responding in an unexpected way to the first watering. After all, according to Backster’s own theory, the dracaena had been reading his mind all this time. It is not altogether implausible that at some level, the plant knew that if it could make itself interesting to Backster and the parapsychological community, it would be more likely to be propagated, a gambit that, given the amount of Backster-inspired dracaena research in the 1970s, may not have been altogether misguided. The question of agency in this dynamic plumbs the depths of human and plant being. Dracaena plants did not foist themselves on human consumers through some crass kind of self-promotion; they did it mutely, through the presence of their form and physiology. At the same time, however, it is equally possible to say that humans did not choose to respond to the meanings expressed by dracaena; those meanings are hardwired into human perception and may even be said to have been shaped by millions of years of living among plants. Even as we shape plants through domestication and genetic engineering, they have shaped us—our senses of taste, sight, and touch, and even, in ways we cannot fully understand but which are omnipresent, the shape of our thoughts and desires. All of these meanings, furthermore, take place at a subconscious or perhaps even preconscious level, as a kind of awareness that is so elemental that the metaphor of ESP or cosmic signals might not be so entirely indefensible. It could even be said that we perceive these meanings in a way that is analogous or maybe homologous with the way that plants intuit nonconceptualized meanings emergent in the environmental stimuli they encounter through their unique sensorium.
Thinking about the agency, language, and subjectivity of plants, therefore, challenges conventional understandings of what these terms mean as applied to human beings. This tendency of plant research to subvert conventional assumptions about human reality may be one reason why botanists are so prone to following Backster’s progress from plant science into science fiction. Representatively, Goethe’s inquiries into plant morphology led him to speculate about the Platonic Urpflanze, Jagadish Chandra Bose’s studies of the electrophysiology in plants led him to the conclusion that all matter was sentient, and, right up to the present day, scientists studying the “Wood Wide Web” have been accused of overgeneralizing their findings in the interest of promoting a representation of mycorrhizal networks as cross-species utopian communities.27 In all of these instances, and in so many other ways, plants suggest, they infer, they indicate, they gesture toward—not toward any one meaning in particular but simply to a kind of aura of meaningfulness, a semantic plenitude that is no less compelling for lacking any specific referent. Possibly it is the unavailability of any referent to the expressiveness of plants that makes their distinctive style of communication so poignant. A flower resembles a message, because it is a message, only it’s not a message to us; it’s a message to pollinating birds and insects, articulated in a language tuned in to the way those animals see, the way they smell, and what arouses their desire. Human beings may not be able to read this message, but the fact that it is a message persists, and so throughout history, human beings have used flowers to express inarticulate sentiments of worship, grief, and joy. The opaque semantic of flowers might even have provided early hominids with their first lessons in semantic expression, cut flowers showing up in graves as some of the first archaeological evidence of symbolic thinking. That fern sitting on a desk is redolent with primordial meanings—meanings of connectedness to the natural world and even to a supernatural world, in the sense that we recognize something imponderable in the mystery of plant being.
More than anything else, Backster’s work with plants constitutes an attempt to investigate the semantic energies that connect plants and people. While Backster’s specific claims, taken literally, are absurd, there is something about their fundamental absurdity that liberates them from the context of science and transports the Backster effect and the whole line of parapsychological investigation that it inspires into the realm of pataphysics. Nitzke had asked whether any attempt to inquire into the secret life of plants was doomed to be a project of anthropocentric epistemological imperialism. She asks, “Can secrets be revealed and protected at the same time?”28 Although Backster presents himself as a sober man of science, when he talks about his plant research, a subversive glint appears in his eye, indicating a self-conscious delight in saying outrageous things. In this respect, Backster may be identified as a pioneer of “patabotany,” a style of pataphysics—“the science of imaginary solutions”—applied to the study of plants. According to Maja Kusanovic, patabotany “subverts the contemporary drive to instrumentalize culture and nature in economic or utilitarian construct. It describes a world where the believable is grafted onto the improbable.”29 Pataphysics, along with its attendant practices of art, irony, and pseudoscience, can be a vehicle for “revealing and protecting” secrets at the same time. Backster’s claims may fail as science, but they succeed as performance art, as cultural criticism, as eco-provocation, as a viral meme (in the Dawkinsian sense), and even as a surreal kind of prop comedy. While the book version of The Secret Life of Plants unapologetically hails Backster as the Newton of a new science, the impression communicated by the film is more complex. The film adaptation of The Secret Life of Plants has documentary-like qualities, but scenes of Backster and his disciples describing their research are accompanied by artsy montage-sequences, a dance performance, music video–style sequences set to songs by the Beatles and Stevie Wonder, spoken-word poetry, and visionary time-lapse photography sequences. It is as if the filmmakers aspired to capture the superabundant expressiveness and vegetative proliferation of plants themselves through the movie’s multimedia bricolage. In this context, Backster’s work with plants comes across as another work of art, intended to inspire wonder and delight rather than literal credulity. Even Peter Tompkins’s staid British narration sometimes seems intentionally Monty Pythonesque, contributing to the persuasiveness of a pataphysical reading of the plant research documented in the film. The reality-distortion of pataphysics allows Backster to translate the plant’s language but also to leave room for irony and polysemy, retaining the plant’s pristine mystery.
If we view Backster’s work through this sympathetic lens, we can even admire the manner in which he has taken the polygraph—a symbol of the technologies of mind control and surveillance, of the policing of epistemological borders, of imperialist interrogation—and transformed it into an instrument capable of revealing a cosmic, hippie truth. If the objections still pertain that Backster’s work is pseudoscientific, lingeringly anthropocentric, and vaguely techno-totalitarian, these problematic aspects lend texture and complexity to his performance, serving to remind us that attempts to communicate with plants will always be limned by ambiguities, contradictions, and absurdities. As plants are commonly used as a synecdoche to signify the environment as a whole, Backster’s story can be read as an allegory of all human attempts to engage with the nonhuman world. In the same way that Backster uses the problematic technology of the polygraph to interrogate his plants, human beings as a species necessarily use the all-too-human faculties of human perception, cognition, and expression to define their own relationship with the nonhuman. This is necessarily true across any mode of human activity, from hunting and gathering to farming to science to industrial chemistry, and it is a contradiction foregrounded in the concept of the environmental humanities itself. As a discipline, the humanities, as Dolly Jørgensen and Franklin Ginn observe, is “a form of knowledge rooted in quite parochial ideas of cultural validity (not the least of which is the Western notion of the human).” One might even say that the cultural tradition of “the humanities” is a techne rooted in many of the same colonial and metaphysical traditions that also produced the polygraph machine, and that using the discipline of “the humanities” as a tool for investigating the nonhuman world inevitably invites the same kind of miscommunication that Backster’s work dramatizes, albeit in a blunter style. At the same time, the practice of the environmental humanities has been to generate new meanings and possibilities for the definition of the humanities in ways that open up its hidebound twentieth-century anthropocentric inheritance to new modes of thinking that become, in Jørgensen and Ginn’s words, “more flexible and far reaching.”30 When we displace Backster’s work from a scientific, objective context it is possible to imagine him as a performative artist whose theme is the relationship between the human and the environment, and whose clownish displays of arrogance and authority contain cautionary value, even as his legacy reminds us that our own visionary failures to commune with the nonhuman environment remain an inevitable component of the human condition.
Notes
Backster’s story is recounted in chapter 1 of Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird’s The Secret Life of Plants, and he tells it himself in the documentary version (Green, Secret Life of Plants).
These experiments are all described in Green, Secret Life of Plants. See also Florenty and Türkowsky, Conversation with a Cactus.
Tompkins and Bird, Secret Life of Plants, 12–13; Green, Secret Life of Plants.
Quoted in Green, Secret Life of Plants.
For an overview of the science of plant communication, see Karban, “Plant Behavior and Communication.”
For an overview of the controversy around plant neurobiology, see Pollan, “Intelligent Plant.”
For an overview of the impact of the environmental movement on cultural attitudes in the 1970s, see Belgrad, Culture of Feedback.
Tompkins and Bird, Secret Life of Plants, 11.
Tompkins and Bird, Secret Life of Plants, 3.
Green, Secret Life of Plants; Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology”; Manes, “Nature and Silence,” 15.
Pollan, Botany of Desire, xx–xxi.
For an insightful analysis of Goethe and the Urpflanze, see Axer and Shields, “Seed of an Idea.” To see Bose’s progression from his experiments with plants to his investigations of “super-physical” phenomena, see Bose, “Response in the Living and Non-living,” 81–82. For the debate about the “Wood Wide Web,” see Popkin, “Are Trees Talking Underground?”
